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Academic Games Are No Fun
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Academics have been flocking to use virtual worlds and multiplayer games as ways to research everything from economics to epidemiology and turn these environments into educational tools. A game called Arden, the World of Shakespeare, funded with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant and developed at Indiana University was supposed to test economic theories by manipulating the rules of the game. There's only one problem. "It's no fun, " says Edward Castronova, Arden's creator and an associate professor of telecommunications at the university. "You need puzzles and monsters," he says, "or people won't want to play ... Since what I really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments on, I decided I needed a completely different approach." Part of the problem is it costs a lot to build a new multiplayer game. While his grant was large for the field of humanities, it was a drop in the bucket compared with the roughly $75 million that goes into developing something on the scale of World of Warcraft. Castronova is releasing Arden to the public as is and says his experience should serve as a warning for other academics. "What we've really learned is, you've got to start with a game first," Castronova says. "You just have to." The new version is titled Arden II: London Burning."
If there is one thing I've seen on The Linux Games Tome, its that it only takes a few people to build a MMORPG. If anything, they should just use the quarter of a million to mobilize some open source programmers around a game that is open source.
I still know when you can ford a river in covered wagon and how to die of cholera.
Didn't we just have this discussion in June?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
I see Arden is just yet another module for Neverwinter Nights. And so long as I need to have THAT installed to play Arden, why don't I just, like, put on my robe and wizard hat and play the main campaign? Of COURSE people don't want your module - you've lashed it to something that's far more compelling.
World of Warcraft is the biggest name out there precisely because it is fun for a lot of people with multiple playing styles. How many games that either weren't fun at all, or only fun for a small subset of a potential player base have gone by the wayside in recent years? There's still something to be said about gabbing a niche for a player base, but the game has to be fun to attract enough people to keep it going. Once the game stops being fun, the only thing to keep it going is the sense of community with the people you're playing with. Once that's gone, people move on.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Perfect Competition is a game that seems to have similar goals, but I guess it must be fun enough for at least a few people to play. It wasn't really my thing but it is a business/economics sim that is quite active. From their site: Players can establish companies, run a hedge fund, direct a company as the chairperson, recruit and dismiss staff, choose markets, set up business units (shops, factories, oil rigs, mines, livestock farms, crop farms, logging camps), deal with suppliers, decide on locations and transport, manage production, pay wages, set prices, innovate and differentiate products, carry out R&D, patent intellectual property, advertise, build brands, sell products, sell services, buy and sell land, invest in real estate, borrow and lend through company bonds, issue shares, invest in shares for dividends, speculate in shares for capital gains, acquire and merge companies, execute hostile takeovers, create horizontal and vertical business conglomerates, buy market research, analyse balance sheets and profit and loss statements, monitor cash flow, examine financial ratios, view economic statistics, and base business decisions on the economy of the game: interest rates, inflation, commodity supply shocks, and more. It is the most comprehensive, realistic and popular business simulation.
Have you thought this through? Whenever a regular MMO changes it's rules, an almost instant flamewar commences and many people leave the game.
If you want people to play your game, and keep playing your game, you will not be able to simply change the rules to test some theory of yours concerning economics... No, you'll have to be busy keeping people interested, and not randomly changing the rules is one aspect of that!
It's a great idea, I give you that, but it's simply not feasible for real...
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I don't know to what degree Word Blaster could be considered academic, but it was fun trying to spell out words by blasting away at the appropriate letters. (And then you had to race the timer and avoid things trying to blow you up.) However I haven't seen that one since the 2600 went in storage... Also how would something simple-stupid like that translate in comparison to modern games?
Also there's some neat game called Armadillo Run that seemed to explore some basic concepts of physics and problem solving. Haven't tried it just yet (too many other distractions eating at my time as it is), but some of the YouTube vids are entertaining enough.
Acedemic games no fun? That's because the focus is WRONG. Games are meant to be fun or entertaining: that must always come first. Same thing with Christian metal bands. If you focus on the message first and not the music, people aren't going to bother even listening because the music is sub par. There are more examples I could go on and on about, but simply put most educational games are misguided because that's the nature of acedemic games. I mean who is going to fund an educational game where only 5-10% vaguely seems educational? But that's what is required.
Actually I don't even think it's that hard to come up with educational games. For instance I can identify every kind of ship in the Star Wars universe and I don't even LIKE Star Wars. Why? Because when playing Tie Fighter it's just secondary knowledge that you picked up. I took a class in college where the class worked on an academic game, and it had potential. It took place in the old west and kids were meant to do various things. Now you aren't going to be able to quiz kids every 30 seconds, but you can easily drop in things that are somewhat educational like what people used to buy, what sort of horse does what task, etc. No one would be rabidly pleased at how educational your game is, but it's not that hard to get people to pick up small bits of real knowledge.
If someone changes the rules to a game, it becomes no fun. If a game is no fun, I don't like to play it.
I sure am glad that he spent some research money on this conundrum.
I remember plenty of fun, academic games that I used to play.
Number Munchers, Super Number Munchers, Donald Duck's Playground, Oregon Trail, Oregon Trial 2, anything involving Sesame Street.
Of course, it's easier to make educational games for children. Part of the reason is that even if they don't know how to play the game as it was intended, they'll play it a different way. I suppose this is also mimicked by adults with Grand Theft Auto, but then again, adults aren't learning much other than the various ways of killing prostitutes.
but it only takes a few people to make a MMORPG only a few people will ever want to play.
Considering all the angst displayed here when World of Warcraft is mentioned there should be no shortage in OS programmers creating new and great MMORPGs to bring down the evil and all so boring and all so many people are leaving and etc etc World of Warcraft.
But there isn't.
The problem in crafting a MMORPG is that it takes a long long time. I can find any number of people "with great ideas for a MMORPG" I just cannot find anyone who is a. willing to expend the real time it will take, b. compromise with others, c. just be available for group meetings, and d. willing to code the grunt side of the setup.
Hell this guy is just making a module for NWN or such... all the ugly stuff most programmers hate is provided (art work etc)
The days of just tossing out something (laughable anyone think a MMORPG can be made quickly - even muds took time to evolve beyond copies of diku)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The idea of a game where the main play activity is to change the rules has a fairly old pedigree -- one variant, called nomic, was popularized (OK, in a geeky sense) by DouglasHofstadter in the Metamagical Themas column in Scientific American way back in 1982, and the game itself is older than that.
Nomic is a little different from the emphasis of TFA, in that nomic's creators focussed on the political implications of self-referential, self-modifying rule systems, and TFA seems to be mostly about the economics of such systems.
I and a group of my friends took on nomic many years ago, and found it to be mostly theoretically interesting, and not all that fun in practice.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
"You need puzzles and monsters" eh? Explain Second Life then.
I don't "get it" (SL) and actually remarked to a co-worker after trying it for a while that it wasn't any fun because you don't kill anything, but lots of people spend a lot of time there.
It needs to be addictively competive! You know, with a scoring system, frags maybe, level-up stuff ...
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Play EVE Online.
Really.
Wouldn't setting up a M.U.D. be a lot more affordable? Granted it's so 1970-ish and not as sexy as "Second Life".
games that are no fun lose interest and the user gives up in frustration, intrigue and challenge the user and you will build LOTS of userbase...
even though the PS2 is obsoleted by the PS3 i still have a blast on that machine, i love first person shooters like Medal of Honor Vanguard, Call of Durty 3 (both of which i rolled the credits on, Grand Theft Auto (Vice City is my favorite) which is kind of a tough game to complete but regarless is lots of fun, on GTA VC go to Hyman Stadium when the clock shows 20:00 the door opens and you can go in and do either a crash derby or stock car racing or dirt bike obstacle course, and at Sunshine Autos go to the lower level to the right there is that one garage door that does not open - next to that garage door is a list of cars wanted, steal those cars and when you compete the list you get a bonus and a new list gets posted...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Ostensibly the idea is to study human populations. The nature of RPG games (or FPSs or Combat Flight Sims etc) is not conducive to that goal. Of course, I could have told them that for considerably less than the $$$ they spent.
I would have chosen a model like Second Life - set up the conditions/environment/physics, and let the users/test subjects run with it.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I make games, and 95% of my focus with a game is to make it fun, and entertaining, and popular. that used to be 100% of the focus until I made this which started getting enquiries from university teachers and students who wanted to integrate it into lessons. That game now has a number of site licenses for schools, and apparently goes down very well. The reason I think it works, is that ultimately, it's just a fun game. The game may make you think about the subject matter (politics) but it doesn't ram it down your throat. It's also not vaguely preachy, and basically tries to be neutral on all issues, which avoid antagonizing or irritating any of the players.
Democracy is popular enough for me to do a sequel (nearly done!), and this time round it does contain a whole bunch of real world statistics and background data (in wiki-style form) which is presented as additional (and optional) to the game itself. This is just like those historical RTS games which have a built in encyclopaedia. You can play Age Of Empires just for fun, but it you really want to find out a bit more about trebuchets, the game is happy to help.
that is as it should be. Games on interesting and intelligent topics that encourage the curious player to learn more. You should never ram the educational bit down the players throats. People play games for fun. If they want to do hardcore learning, they break out a textbook.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
It seems pointless to build an economic game that nobody will play, or that (in the best possible world) will:
- be played by a bunch of self-selected participants who are conscious of the testing and metrics, and thus will actively seek to 'game' them if possible.
- be played by too small a group to draw reasonable statistical inferences (seriously, in their wildest dreams, do they expect more than 25,000 players?)
I would argue that it would make much more sense to approach Blizzard, sign NDA's out the wazoo, and get their buy-in to do economic research with their data. Granted, you don't have a complete tabula rasa, but the value of hundreds of millions of transactions should be enough to outweigh the capability to 'set up' experiments as in a lab.* I think that with this many actions going on, you could really draw some subtle data out of the world based on very small changes to how certain things are priced.
IIRC Eve's doing this with an economics professor already.
* besides, as a WoW player, I'd love to have an economist speak to them at length about how some of their decisions occasionally really fark up their economics.
-Styopa
It's a "virtual world". I think they're trying to make it something similar to the web. As in, the web is not a game, but you can implement games in it. Same way, SL is not a game, but you can implement games inside.
I'd say it parallels the web quite nicely in that SL is really a medium for doing things. Some people play. Some use it as a 3D chat. Some as a base for programming/building projects. Some role play. For some it allows simulating their dreams: If you want to be an anthropomorphic cat, or to live in a steampunk styled world, there's that as well.
If you want games, they can be implemented inside SL, though of course there are limits to how well it works. Things like chess are easy enough to implement in SL, though implementing a chess AI is probably nearly impossible in LSL. FPS style deathmatch can be had very easily, though since the guns are all user made there's nobody ensuring it's balanced.
Of course not everybody gets SL, just not like everybody gets the web. If you asked my parents they wouldn't have a clue why there are so many people posting here, for them it's not "real" and completely pointless.
I think the use of the term "game" may be misleading here. If the goal of the project was to provide fun and entertainment, then in this case, it appears to fail. But if the goal was to provide new tools and new ways of looking at data and systems, then maybe this shines? Just because something isn't fun doesn't mean it isn't useful.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I always like Organ Trail, I just wish they had a Mormon Trail version. Where you not only had to worry about surviving, but keeping your wives from killing each other.
with the Academic Games?
Monstar L
I loved that game in elementary school
Why aim for Warcraft? Unless the aim is to limit research to owners of high-end computers who rank graphics at least as high as gameplay and have large amounts of spare time and will put up with grinding, then it's the wrong model to compare such a project to.
Planetarion peaked at over 100,000 players (before it went pay-to-play) and all you need to play it is a browser. It's a simple game to code, as evidenced by the countless clones that were quickly written when the owners started charging. Gameplay there happens in 3-month (or so) rounds, with rule changes each round, so it's the perfect model for the research described.
Cutting things down further, the browser-based NationStates is so trivial it's barely even a game, and there's practically no in-game interaction between players, but 1.9 million nations have been created. It works because it's a nice idea, and it has forums where people roleplay all the things the game ought to include but doesn't.
If you want a game where economics play a big part, aim it at web users. There's a huge and nearly empty market for an blackberry/iPhone MMPORG. Make it turn-based so you can play it to a decent standard even if you only log in once a day, and hard-core players don't need to check in more than once an hour. Political Asylum provides an excellent model of how this can work.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Use the funds and partner with other mmorpg to capture a periods worth of data?
So capture everything that happens in several different mmorpgs servers(1 per mmorpg) for a year, and put it into a simulation and change the events.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
He might want to consider talking to Simutronics about using their HeroEngine http://www.heroengine.com/ (I"ll get the hang on /. linking someday!) They might hook him up cheap.(Pricing varies, it seems. Educational+Good Publicity=Cheap(??).
Really depends on where he's having "issues", though.
My personal choice is City of Heroes/City of Villains, though. Sadly, I have to do without until my fiancee gets back from her business trip(s)...sometime early next year. O, woe is me!(She has the laptop I use to play and I don't have quite enough for a system to run it. If I can scrape up the cash, I might go with a low end System76 machine)
"True, but that's mainly because of one time-consuming thing you didn't list: building up the user base and getting them to stay there, so that the network effects take off. (The feeling that they're being toyed with isn't good for that.)"
You still need assets to build that base upon. I don't see anything changing that soon.
Goo goo g'joob.
We have been working on developing computer games for K-12 students to learn chemistry-related concepts here at the University of Alabama, and at least our test subjects seem to find them fun and helpful.
... which I don't disagree with. By the time I see college freshman, it is sometimes very hard to undo the damage of years of neglect in public schools.
...)
http://www.mint.ua.edu/games/
I'm not directly involved with assessment of what the kids thought though, so I don't have the hard data at hand, and I can only say that I found them neat. More and more, academics are being pressured to perform this kind of outreach
posted AC for obvious reasons. and yes, we have computers *and* programmers in Alabama (cf discussion yesterday
I agree, and I'll point to Age of Empires as an example.
In junior high and the beginning of high school, I had a number of history classes focusing on the ancient world. Simply knowing the vocabulary -- having an idea what a phalanx is, or a trireme -- was useful when writing essays. Of course, Age of Empires is not a faithful simulation of ancient combat, but it gets enough right that its educational value is definitely nonzero. In fact, the manual that came with the game (do people read those? I did.) gives a nice little historical description for each of the different cultures and units.
And that was a very popular game. So much so that Microsoft bought Ensemble Studios.
I'd say you learn something about Word War II by playing many of the military games out there. People who play Counterstrike learn something about real-world guns.
Games need backstory, they need props -- they need a world. I think the trick to making a game educational is largely just to make that backstory and those props not just realistic, but to make them actually real -- that is, historically accurate. And there are plenty of good, fun game concepts for which you can naturally do that.
Replace X with any form of mass media and the statement is still true. Discuss. Next up on Slashdot: hard drive failures and root canals are no fun.
My girlfriend is in her Masters in Ecological Education; one of her professors wants me to demo WoW for him because he's considering a project for an academic MMO based on playing a part of an ecosystem.
No, you wouldn't be a plant looking for the bursting seed pod powerup. You would be a lion hunting gazelles, or a gazelle dodging lions, and dealing with the normal cyclical changes environmental changes, or manmade ones. The idea would be to view an ecosystem from within it, but (hopefully) with enough of a "nature red in tooth and claw" angle to make it actually interesting as a playable environment.
It's a long shot concept that risks exactly what Arden failed at, but properly done it could be another Tale in the Desert.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
What you need is people. WoW has that; so does SL. Weave's right, the sheer number of concurrents and accounts on SL proves no "quest" is required. Note that WoW and SL both took *years* to get up to impressive critical mass. The "Arden" guys are complaining that they can't replicate that in... what? Weeks? Sigh. An attention span > gnat, maybe even > VC, is required to succeed in an virtual online space.
The article is far too eager to make the leap from "this academic game failed" to "academic games fail". Apply the same logic to commercial games, and Daikatana should have proved that FPSs are no longer popular.
Arden failed. Is it because:
A. it was an attempt to make an academic game, or
B. it was an addon module for a commercial game that might not appeal to Arden's target audience, or
C. its subject matter just wasn't interesting to its target audience, or
D. the game design was poor, or
E. the game execution was poor, or
F. it was poorly promoted, or...
You get the picture. Arden was different from most games in that it had an academic goal. Its failure doesn't imply that its difference from most games is to blame--in fact, its failure probably makes it more similar to the average commercial game...
Maybe they were eating it mostly raw?
They'd have to be. Who shoots an 800 pound buffalo and only takes 100 pounds of meat back with them?
I don't know what's more impressive to me:
I) A professor did not realize people would not play his game if it wasn't fun.
B) Someone in charge of $250k did not realize this.
or
3) He doesn't realize that if Arden wasn't fun, no one will even look at Arden 2
Conclusion) Now he's got funding for an Arden2???
After failing miserably to draw any attention to themselves for releasing yet-another MMO, it seems the developers have found the true key to any game's success: Marketing.
I'm relatively informed about gaming, and I'd never heard of this one until they made a big deal about how it failed. And of course while the article is all about how they tried really hard to make this first one good, it spends a few paragraphs reassuring us how the next one will be much better because they've learned from their mistakes.
So they've not only gotten more attention for their current offering, they've already started the hype machine for the second. And while they couldn't get coverage on random blogs before, who wants to bet we'll see reviews for "Arden II" in the likes of Game Informer and IGN? They'll all have the same headline: "Academic gaming learns from it's mistakes and offers a learning experience that's actually fun!"
Reading the article isn't much fun either.
Homer says "BBBbbbbbboooooooorrrrrrinnnnnngggggggggg"
Take http://www.freerice.com/ as a simple illustrative example.
It's incidental that hungry people get feed by the ad views on the page while I guess words, I just like guessing the words. At best it gives me an excuse to rationalize playing. The game format is what feeds the academic / humanitarian purpose, not the other way around.
Guessing words for ad views for buying rice is trivial, but makes obvious at a glance the bare essentials of the article posters' argument, and that it scales up.
Academic games are fun if you yourself like the academic subject qua itself, (bare-bones finite state machine coding 'games' are an example of this), but that audience is almost always just too narrow.
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, preserved their neutrality." -Dante
This makes me angry on so many levels...
First of all, appropriating Shakespeare as the vehicle for your game, and he wasn't focusing on getting the story to work? What's the matter with him!
Second of all, his focus was on virtual economies? Why on earth did he pick Shakespeare? So it'd make the grant more palatable? I'm sure all the people trying to get funding for actual games that want to tackle new media translations of traditional works will love him for setting such a...prestigious example.
So congratulations, Ed. You spent $250,000 in an age when educational funding is on the decline to do what a group of enthusiasts would have accomplished FOR FREE and DONE BETTER. Somebody that actually knew something about game design should have slapped him around right at the beginning when he was pitching this, and set him straight. I mean it could have been amazing. But he totally screwed up.
Oh, and I'm just DYING to see what Arden II is going to be. Elizabethan England with monsters. Maybe it'll be a Hellgate mod.
Believe it or not, but i learned everything i needed to know about (macro|micro)economics from both the Civilization series and OpenTTD. Openttd.org changed the way i look at a lot of prices and investment opportunities.
j^2
> Arden, the World of Shakespeare, funded with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant
> and developed at Indiana University was supposed to test economic theories by manipulating
> the rules of the game. There's only one problem. "It's no fun"
Presumably this wasn't one of their Genius grants...
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There are academics like me who just take existing games for their research. My students and I modify games so they become accessible to players with disabilities. See our one button version of halflife2 http://www.helpyouplay.com/gtf.html or our guitar hero for the blind http://www.helpyouplay.com/blind_hero.html
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...
The Typing of the Dead.
Don't tell me academic games aren't fun.
I've had more fun learning about female anatomy playing h-games than I ever did in sex ed. What do you mean those aren't academic games?
Bad idea to mod an existing game. Better to use Unity or Torque, Blender for modelling and animation. You don't need monsters and puzzles, you need CONTENT. I have no karma, so I'll link to my own game dev blog. Give me 250k, I could build an immersive 3D multiplayer shakespeare world that plays right in your browser. Academics are rightly intrigued by the possibilities of virtual worlds, but need to realize that it's much harder to develop that kind of content. No surprise that this guy couldn't do it, but it CAN be done by skilled individuals rather than armies of specialists.
it was my lot a couple years ago to be the primary developer of a Shared Collaborative Virtual Environment at a major US university, and frankly what passed for excellent and ground-breaking in that context was something i was embarassed to have my name associated with, coming from the private sector. academia seems to fundamentally not get it. in my case i blame unrealistic budgets, a beaurocratic devotion to academically-pedigreed technologies over the best of breed, which was engendered by the academic grant system, and a complete absence of anything resembling project managers.
Whatever criticisms you may have of Castronova's Arden I and Arden II projects, you'd be silly to think he's not on the right track. The power of an interactive, stimulating medium like virtual worlds (aka, 3D digital worlds) as a tool for learning doesn't need to be proved since it's already being used. From the US Army to flight training to medical education, it's happening. -Bringing this medium that to "digital native" kids is a no-brainer; it WILL be done. It's just a question of how and when. We believe it should be done in a way that makes it free to everyone to create content and use the content that others create. Please see our ideas for doing this at the New Nexus project here: http://newnexus.org./
Read more about our project to get a tool kit to make virtual worlds made at http://newnexus.org